elcome to Jenna Coleman Online, your best source for everything on the Blackpool born actress Jenna Coleman. She's best known for her role as Clara Oswald in Doctor Who, but she's now our fierce Queen Victoria in the ITV hit Victoria.

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Season three will begin in 1848, a “hugely dramatic and eventful” time for the royals as revolutions across Europe created uncertainty around the monarchy.

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WWD – Around this time last year, British actress Jenna Coleman was aboard a plane to Australia. “With the most amount of fear,” she adds.

Coleman was en route to film the mystery BBC miniseries “The Cry,” which debuted in the fall of 2018. “What’s been most amazing is the speculation,” she says of reaction to the show and the accompanying whodunit around a mother and her missing child. “The worst thing in the world would be a really obvious psychological thriller that doesn’t keep people guessing; that doesn’t have secrets.”

Coleman’s had little time to catch her breath since that plane ride — a day after wrapping “The Cry,” she was back in character as Queen Victoria for the third season of “Victoria,” which premieres Jan. 13. There’s been a lot of filming, a lot of press, and as Coleman puts it, “It’s been a real freight train of a year.”

“To be honest, each project that you start feels quite scary, always feels like a bit of a mountain in a way in terms of: how on earth do I get to know who the real Queen Victoria was? And how on earth do I play a grieving mother going through the most unimaginable circumstances in a way that can lend itself to a thriller where you have to play the truth, but never give the truth?”

The answer for Coleman is a lot of research channeled through intuition. At the end of the second season of “Victoria,” her character had already become a mother to three children, with four more “on the way.”

“The feeling we left them with was ‘we’re no longer children anymore, are we?’” she says, describing the dynamic with her onscreen husband Prince Albert, played by her real-life partner Tom Hughes. “And then we pick up this season and it’s like: jump cuts, so many years [have passed], they have seven children now, they’ve been married 10 years. And so she herself is older and looking at [the question] how do we age?”

While the 32-year-old brunette has no personal experience as a mother to draw from, Coleman still had a deep pool of maternal proclivities to tap into for both “The Cry” and the upcoming season of “Victoria,” and in a way, her portrayals benefited from her explorations of the other one.

THE LAST MAGAZINE – It’s December, a week before Christmas, and the English actress Jenna Coleman finally has some time to herself. “We just wrapped another season of Victoria, which is amazing because I’m home,” she exhales, referring to the PBS series on which she plays the eponymous queen so momentous she had an entire era named after her. “I’m literally cutting up vegetables as I speak to you—in my own clothes for probably the first time this year.”

Coleman has been acting since she was eighteen years old, when she landed a part in the long-running British soap opera Emmerdale. This experience proved more useful than drama school, offering her the opportunity to work with a range of different actors and directors during her four years on the show. Over the course of the last decade, her career has continued to blossom, first as the companion of the eleventh doctor (played by Matt Smith) on the classic series Doctor Who and now as the sex-loving, perennially pregnant young queen in Victoria, which returns for its third season this week. None of this, however, prepared her for her latest role as Joanna.

In the new Sundance Now miniseries The Cry, Coleman’s Joanna is a schoolteacher who falls for Alistair (Ewen Leslie), a media savant with a commanding presence and a way with words that clearly overpower her. After losing their infant son to unforeseen circumstances, the couple face the insatiable media, relentless and untrusting detectives, concerned relatives, and even agitated exes. “I felt like she was the last person in the world who would ever want that kind of attention, especially when we first meet her,” explains Coleman. “She’s kind of small and wearing this gray sweater and wants to curl up into a ball.”

ROLLACOASTER – Allow me to introduce the “impossible girl”. She’s visited hundreds of galaxies with a Time Lord and ruled the British Empire, dealt with dukes and Daleks (I’ll leave you to decide which are worse), but right now the most impossible thing she’s facing is trying to find somewhere to chat to me on the phone without cracking up the people around her. “Sorry!” She laughs when we finally connect. “You just caught me in the car with my driver and I knew he’d just giggle at everything I’m saying!”

Of course, the girl in question is Jenna Coleman, who obtained the tagline from her role as the Eleventh Doctor’s companion in the beloved BBC series Doctor Who. Accompanying both Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, Jenna rose to fame as Clara Oswald, the witty school teacher with the ability to charm alien life forms in numerous universes.

The chance to escape to different world’s has always appealed to Jenna and exploring alternate realities is what first made her want to get into acting. “I remember reading Enid Blyton and loads of books and their worlds becoming very vivid in my head,” she recalls. “I just remember being really, really young and for some reason it always just felt very simple. Acting was always what I wanted to do, it was more the ‘how’ that was always the more complicated thing.”

Putting in the hard work to make the “how” happen, Jenna scored her first role in Emmerdale in 2005, before getting the coveted companion role in 2012. Stepping into such a popular fandom was initially quite intimidating, but Jenna has since established a legacy as one of the most loved of the Doctor’s partners (soz, Martha). “I’ve never done anything where you’re the only new cog in a very oiled machine,” she explains. “It’s like you’re literally the only newbie on your own, which is quite a strange thing. You kind of have to hop onto a train that’s already full-speed ahead.”

THE TELEGRAPH – Towards the end of the first episode of The Cry, the BBC drama sent to fill the gaping Sunday night chasm left by Bodyguard, Jenna Coleman’s character, Joanna – a mother suffering from postnatal depression whose baby son suddenly disappears – talks about what it is like having two faces: one to be scrutinised by the public, another that exists in private.

It is, of course, a terrible cliché for an interviewer to draw parallels between an actor and the character they are playing. But given our insatiable social-media-fuelled appetite for personal information (and the fact that Coleman has had her love life very publicly dissected), when I meet the 32-year-old in a London hotel, I feel vaguely justified in trying to do just that.

She smiles. “I guess there is that,” she says. “I mean, I can definitely associate with that sensation of feeling… exposed.” Coleman was once linked with Prince Harry after she was photographed talking to him at a polo match. She used to go out with Richard Madden, star of Bodyguard (yes, she watched it) and is now shacked up with Tom Hughes, who plays her on-screen husband in Victoria. So she knows a bit about having all eyes on her.

The twist in The Cry, Coleman points out, is that the mother, Joanna, hasn’t signed up for anything like that. “She is a primary school teacher, who is quite shy, who is having to go through these horrific circumstances with all of these cameras pointed at her.” She notes that in the novel on which the new four-part drama is based, by the Australian thriller writer Helen FitzGerald, Joanna describes “feeling like an animal in a zoo”.

We now live in a world where every facial expression, every move, gets interpreted – and often as something that it isn’t. Coleman asks if I have seen the Nosedive episode of Charlie Brooker’s science fiction series Black Mirror, in which people give each other star ratings after every interaction.

THE OBSERVER – The other day Jenna Coleman gave birth for the seventh time. “I feel like my year has been literally maternity bras and pregnancy bumps,” she says over a cup of tea in acafénear her home in north London. “It’s becoming a parody now.” Before you start to worry about the medical anomaly that is Coleman’s uterus, rest assured it was all for the cameras. In real life, the 32-year-old Coleman has yet to have children: “I don’t know if the time is now for me,” she says. Onscreen, however, she has been through a long phase of playing mothers.

She is in the middle of filming the third series of Victoria, the hit ITV drama scripted by Daisy Goodwin in which Coleman plays the titular queen, and “we’re up to the seventh child now, which is just ridiculous”. Victoria ultimately had nine so, she adds, “I’m not out of the woods yet.” And then there’s the forthcoming BBC psychological drama, The Cry, in which Coleman plays Joanna, a young mother in present-day Glasgow, struggling to adapt to the demands of her newborn. Coleman had to pretend to give birth for that as well, screaming and gripping on to the side of the hospital bed with bared teeth and a sweat-drenched face. It was very convincing, I say. “Oh was it?” Coleman asks. “Good.” In order to get into the zone before filming a labour scene, she listens to music by Mumford & Sons. “There’s something about the banjo,” she explains. “I just try to get up a lot of adrenaline and for some reason the banjo and the drums, I think, help. I don’t know…” Has Coleman ever met her fellow actor, Carey Mulligan, who is married to the band’s frontman, Marcus Mumford? “No! Can you imagine if I did and said: ‘Your husband helps my labour scenes?’”

It turns out that giving birth is only the start of the action in The Cry. The four-part series, adapted from the eponymous novel by Australian author Helen Fitzgerald, centres on a shocking tragedy that triggers Joanna’s psychological unravelling. In charting her mental disintegration, the drama seeks to expose the myths and unacknowledged truths of motherhood. It’s a compelling watch, but in a piece so focused on the complexities of being a parent, I wonder if Coleman ever worried about not having children herself. “Yeah. I spent a good first chunk of it just thinking they’d completely miscast – and why on earth me?” she replies. “I’m not a mother! I really kind of hit myself over the head with it. I felt there was obviously something I wouldn’t be able to capture. It was something so… well, primal that I haven’t literally experienced. And I’ve really struggled with that.” She emailed all her friends who had babies asking for insight, and received reams of information in return, “just the kind of day-to-day realities of what it is being a new mum…”

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